Projective modules and complete intersections (Q5906817)

After Quillen and Suslin settled a celebrated conjecture of Serre in 1976, the study of projective modules over polynomial rings has been very intense. Serre himself raised this question in relation with determining which subvarieties of affine spaces are complete intersections, and thus the themes of projective modules and complete intersections are well related. There are excellent accounts of these proofs already in the literature. For example, the lecture notes by \textit{T. Y. Lam} [``Serre's conjecture'', Lect. Notes Math. 635 (1978; Zbl 0373.13004)]. These lecture notes under review can be considered as a sequel to the lecture notes of Lam. Even before Serre's conjecture was settled, there were several interesting results about modules and ideals over polynomial rings proved by \textit{D. Eisenbud} and \textit{E. G. Evans} jun. [in: Conf. Commutat. Algebra, Lawrence, Kansas 1972, Lect. Notes Math. 311, 78-89 (1973; Zbl 0265.13004)] and \textit{O. Forster} [Math. Z. 84, 80-87 (1964; Zbl 0126.27303)]. Several of these results and conjectures therein were combined in a more or less uniform way after the results of Quillen and Suslin. The author describes in these notes some of these results. Starting from very basic facts, the author develops the necessary machinery to prove many of these theorems, which include almost all important results in this direction in the last two decades. Though the author reproves the Quillen-Suslin theorem in these notes, the focus is more towards later developments. There are theorems of Sathaye and the reviewer, Plumstead, Cowsik-Nori, Ferrand-Szpiro and the reviewer, Murthy, Lyubeznik, Bhatwadekar-Roy and of course some of the results of the author himself. The results are presented in fairly elementary language and most people should be able to follow the arguments in full. I would recommend these notes to any student of commutative algebra.